Digital Time, Broken Time and Alienation
Our sense of time is broken, and it has been for some time. The digital world moves much faster than the physical world. That is an unavoidable reality. The digital world was once a shadow of the physical world, but it has now eclipsed it and overshadows the physical world. The digital is still no more than a shadow itself, but it has managed to cast the physical world into darkness. Even if that seems impossible and illogical, it is our reality.
The speed of the digital has made us impatient with the speed of the physical. We expect decisions in and regarding the physical world to be made as quickly as messages move in the digital. We expect results to appear just as quickly. We want instantaneous decisions and results: an ecstasy of decisions and results. (Forgetting how empty the ecstasy of communication in the digital world tends to leave us.) That will never happen, and the unrelenting desire and expectation for this ecstasy alienates us from the physical.
A change has been forced upon our everyday lives now. It has been forced upon us by a physical reality that cannot be meaningfully copied or mirrored in the digital: not in algorithms, images, charts, graphs nor models. I hope this change can help us come to terms with this new alienation and doesn't drive us deeper it to it. These physical restrictions are a double edged sword that can cut either way; it all depends on which way (or ways) we push the blade.
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